McGraw, John J. 2012. What is Intersubjectivity? THERE Journal of Design 8: 72-77.

What is Intersubjectivity?

Ding-Dong, Descartes is dead!

Or so seem to ring the bells. Frankly, I think the admonished

philosopher has been overburdened, carrying the full weight of a philosophical travesty for which he is only partly to blame. Indeed, long before he published the famous Je pense donc je suis in Discourse on Method (1637), a phrase better known in its Latin translation Cogito ergo sum from Principles of Philosophy (1644), mind/body dualism had long ruled the roost. At least since Platos time, the idea that the source of goodness, beauty, and truth was immaterial and that these things were, at best, poorly mimicked in their real world manifestations, mind/body dualism had become dogmaliterally. Platonic notions that divested the body and, indeed, the physical world of its goodness formed the central pillar of Christian theology. So by Descartes time, everyone knew full well that the important things about themselves resided in an immaterial soul while much of the unsavory, wicked, and debased could be located in the body. The separation of mind and body, spirit and matter, the eternal and the ephemeral, had become truisms by the time Descartes wrote his treatises. But nowadays you would think it was he alone who made such a philosophical mess of things. Anyway, to begin a discussion of

intersubjectivity it is important to understand the foundations of mind/body dualism in order to appreciate the antiquity of the world view that elicits our discussion here.

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Why inter? Why subjectivity? A number of contemporary philosophers and psychologists would have you believe that your subjectivity, that personal consciousness wherein you entertain your desires for nicer shoes and different politicians, is a human universal somehow derivative of that marvelous one percent of DNA that genetically distinguishes us from chimpanzees. I am not so sure. As a cognitive anthropologist I have had a chance to look over some of the literature regarding notions of mind, self, and identity in different cultures. Like most anthropologists, I basically affirm the psychic unity of mankind, that is, the notion that people everywhere and always possess the same mental capacities. In other words, the blue I see when looking up at the sky and the tenderness I feel when embracing a loved one is essentially the same experience that my Aurignacian ancestors had in Ice Age Europe and that my present-day cousins have in Tierra del Fuego and the rainforests of Borneo. The latest research indicates that subtle aspects of perception may vary (there are color blind people after all) but human beings are pretty much the same biological creatures wherever they live, both now and in our species primordial past. Nevertheless, there are fascinating differences in a whole range of perceptual and cognitive skills due to particularities of development and education. An expert hunter who has spent hours trailing his game sees, hears, smells, and feels things I would not even know were possible to perceive. In short, experience matters. Education, socialization, development, all these things go into the molding of an incredibly plastic nervous system to permit a kaleidoscopic array of human experience; because of this, some feel utter despair when witnessing an eclipse, trapeze artists can fly through the air, twirl like gyroscopes, and grasp batons at just the right moment, and composers can create music that will bring tears to your

eyes. It may even be the case that those fundamental ideas about subjectivity and sense of self are not so stable or universal. There has long been a debate about egocentric versus sociocentric identity types across cultures. In broad strokes, scholars have claimed that numerous Asian cultures promote a deeply collective sense of self; one is motivated to behave well in order to promote the familys honor and feels bereft if the family name is tarnished by a heedless uncle. This is understood to be quite different than American attitudes about individualism; after all, one must make his mark and prove himself by going it alone. And those increasingly ubiquitous disclaimers about avoiding judgment of anyone based on race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, disability, or sexual orientation

is just another way of saying, you are your own person in this world, backgrounds be damned! No doubt the realities are endlessly messier than these neat divisions but it is easy enough to acknowledge the idea that some settings train people to be collectivistic while others presume it natural (and eminently preferable, our God-given democratic right) to be a rugged individual. But if you acknowledge the idea

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that people may fundamentally do what they do, feel what they feel, and think what they think according to different axes of self-other conception; well then, weve started to go down that rabbit hole together. But back to inter and subjectivity. Actually, its best to reverse the terms. Well start with subjectivity. As is often the case in Western philosophical frameworks, one term implies its opposite. To properly define subjectivity you have to contrast it with objectivity. So, at once, a division has gone right down the center of the world: there is ones internal experience, all those petty desires and beliefs about things, and there is the real world, the world of objects, all those things out there made of wood, concrete, and polyurethane. If this sounds familiar its because weve already gotten back to that mind/body dualism that has turned Descartes into a dirty word. There is the world of the subject (and there can only be one subject because how can you experience anyone elses mind?) and there is the world of objects. One is the source of feelings and bad poetry, the other the source of material, all that stuff which subjects use to build boats and bridges. Subjectivity, according to dualists, is one of two basic types of being while objects made out of matter are an entirely different kind of being. Thus, my mind exists in one dimension of realitythe mental worldwhile my body, which can stretch out to make contact with other things, belongs to a different world altogether. Unfortunately, we threaten to run ourselves aground if we start to complicate this picture with that awful prefix, inter-. Because if there is a fundamental chasm between subjects and objects then were going to have a lot of trouble trying to make sense of intersubjectivity because, guess what, one persons subjectivity is another persons object. Once youve established this subject/object dualism it becomes rather difficult to bridge your experience to anyone elses. How do I really know youre not just in my head?

Ive had dreams, after all, and those experiences have proven perfectly attendant conversational partners to be imaginary. Are you starting to feel a bit claustrophobic? I know I did when I first thought about this stuff. How do we build a bridge so that there is an inter to our subjectivity? Within this dualistic framework, words become rather important because they end up being one of the few ways we have to send up smoke signals from our solitary pillars and recognize that other people exist by deciphering those puffs of smoke off in the distance. If this sounds a bit ridiculous, it really isnt. It is pretty much the standard way that linguistic meaning was understood to work for quite some time. Human communication is all about the transmission and reception of relatively arbitrary codes we call languages. What you refer to as a tree, the next person calls Baum and someone else calls rbol. How do we ever learn to decipher the meaning of the odd puffs of air that we sculpt in our mouths? Growing up in a given culture, we learn that the code word for those pointy things in the yard is tree, the code word for that feeling you have when a puppy licks your face is happy, and so on. According to the dualists then, pretty much the only way we make sense of each other and the world we may or may not experience in similar ways is by using these arbitrarily coded messages. And though they seem to work pretty well for the most part, everyone also knows how hard it is to really get someone to understand what youre talking about: Good lord, how can you be a Republican, a Democrat, an Anarchist? Dont you just know how wrong that is, like I do? I could sit here and talk to you all day (provided my emotions are kept in check) but youll still walk away thinking youre right and Im wrong. And then theres always the male/female disconnect. It would seem that no matter how clearly a male might explain himself to his wife (and we all know that his idea of fully explaining himself is some quantity of poorly chosen words between a phrase and a couple of sentences), she

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will be left feeling unappreciated and probably a bit hurt while he will feel nothing but confusion as he stomps off to pound a beer or punch a wall. So language has some pretty basic limitations that we forget about until we find ourselves stymied by a misunderstanding and realize just how isolated we anchorites are, alone on our pillars forever separate from the world. Is the term intersubjectivity anything more than a bad joke? Snap! All that came before was mere staging and preparation for a quick sleight-of-hand: dualism is an illusion, there is only intersubjectivity. Moreover, because there is only intersubjectivity, the idea of intering subjectivity does not make sense, for subjectivity itself is the final demonstration that human experience is never, in fact, personal; it is always mediated by culture and the world; it is always shared. What? Intersubjectivity is a bad joke but not because we find ourselves at a loss to really experience it, as our Western-PlatonicChristian-Cartesian heritage would have us believe, but because it is amusing that we could ever convince ourselves that the separation of mind and body, of individual and society, was actually possible. Imagine a stalwart anttwo paces behind the ant in front of him, two paces in front of the ant behind him, locked into a vividly demarcated chemical trail for which his sensory apparatus is perfectly attuned, at work in his daily activities, cutting leaves with his brethren, carrying them back in lockstep with the others to their underground colony thinking to himself, why doesnt everyone recognize how particularly well I do what I do, adrift in the existential quandary, and why am I so alone? Just because we can have an experience, it does not follow that it is our personal experience.

In fact, I am beginning to think that the only way we can experience something is precisely because it is our experience, that is, the kind of experience we can conceive because of what weve heard, read about, or seen on TV. Truly personal experiences, those vague, uneasy states of mind which are both ineffable and inchoate, are not properly experiences. We simply dont know what to do with them because we dont have the frames, models, or schemas to make them comprehensible and communicable. Of course, most experience is not like this, most of the time we know our own minds and we feel ways that weve felt before and that we can talk to others about. In short, most of what we experience is a shared and sharable experience. When an A on an exam or a compliment on the haircut we just received makes us feel a certain way, it is neither because our DNA programmed us to feel this particular response to these particular stimuli, nor is it the first or last time in the history of the universe that someone has felt or will feel an abdominal flutter because of an arbitrary marking on an assessment or for exhibiting an appearance that others have determined to be attractive at that place and moment in history. Interfaces and intersubjectivity imply illusory barriers to experience, illusory because there is no separation between individual and society or person and environment. Rather, to experience something personally has everything to do with the gating of attention to permit experience to flow from that whole of which we are always

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a part to that part which we can experience individually, that is, in our organism. And even here the laws of physiology are not so fixed or biologically-determined as some would have us believe; after all, one mans pain is anothers perverse pleasure. A day of labor for one person elicits pure boredom while the same labor for another produces sheer exultation. These variations are not due to physical differences but to experiential frames as well as culturallymediated expectations and values. Human experience, like water, comes into and out of our bodies but is never really ours to hold on to and possess. Even personal memories are less the possession of experience than the traces of those rivulets, streams, and torrents that have flowed into and out of us. What are the sources of our intersubjectivity, our shared experience? Human beings are the recipients of bodies that are millions of years in the making. Again, we all possess pretty much the same sensory organs, spinal columns, and adrenal glands. Because of the bodies we share, much of the phenomenal world will be experienced in a predictably similar way. If I tell you that the UV spectrum is quite vivid today or complain about the loudness of pollens rustling across the ground or note how the smell of those people who walked by last week still lingers in the air, youll wonder if Ive lost my mind. We all know that the set of experiences we can have fall within relatively fixed parameters. So the bodies we possess are a crucial foundation of our shared world. And the environments we inherit are just as important as our biological endowment. Human environments are engineered environments. The social worlds we are born into and the physical worlds that we inhabit exhibit artificial and technological features that extend back to the origin of our species. For instance, the dog nestled beside me is not a natural creature; in fact, Chico the chihuahua is basically a wolf that has come to maturity retaining most of the characteristics of his fetal stage of development. This process has created a very strange wolf indeed! Our ancestors, unintentionally at first but later accelerated through selective breeding, have carved out a set of biological tools from the
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raw stuff of Canis lupus just as surely as they knapped flint to form hatchets and arrowheads. All those of us now alive who enjoy delightful relationships with tail-wagging wolf pups, do so only because our ancestors behaved certain ways vis--vis this other species over tens of thousands of years. Moreover, because human beings have so much experience with dogs, we can now conceive and express a range of ideas and employ a set of metaphors that would be impossible otherwise. So when Odysseus ill-treated hound Argos, enfeebled by a life of want after his masters departure to Troy, is the first to recognize him back in Ithaca all those years later, pricking up his ears and wagging his tail just before expiring, we are left with a powerful sense of canine loyalty and offered an expression of interspecies affection that warms the heart. Keep in mind, too, that this was a Mycenaean tale from Bronze Age Greece, yet we moderns understand exactly what is meant by Homers word-image. And ever since, weve only amplified the conceptual importance that our historically deep experience with dogs has permitted: bitch, let loose the dogs of war!, leash, a dogs life, Lassie, I bet youre all bark and no bite, keep your nose to the ground, filthy dogs!, dog collar, Ive got his scent now, she lapped up all the attention, put a muzzle on that guy!, and so on. These things are meaningful, or more to the pointthese things produce meaningbecause weve inherited engineered environments millennia in the making.

Whatever the reason, and it may have something to do with the historical inertia of that dualist legacy, it is only now that researchers are beginning to appreciate just how deeply

intertwined our experiences are with the built worlds wherein we dwell. Many of the cognitive feats for which the human brain receives sole credit are at least as dependent upon specialized tools and the cultural practices that have instructed us in their proper usage as any particular neuronal circuitry. Mathematicians, painters, and architects appreciate how much of their thinking comes about on canvas and paper. Remove those varied media, take away the assortment of brushes and pens, keep the children illiterate, and we simply could not have an advanced level of physics, art, or construction. However vivid an image might seem in the minds eye, all the requisite details only come into high resolution once the interrelated dimensions are properly scaled on graph paper or the colors stippled into contrast on canvas.

language of coordination, entrainment, synchronization, coupling, and so forth. Perhaps once we get down the road a ways, well be able to get over the linguistic hindrances of the the past so that we can accurately discuss process and function when we talk about ourselves and the worlds we help to construct.

John J. McGraw, author of Brain & Belief: An Exploration of the Human Soul, is a TESIS postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark. An acronym for Towards an Embodied Science of InterSubjectivity, TESIS is a Marie Curie Initial Training Network funded by the European Union (FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN, 264828). The network is composed of thirteen research centers that investigate the foundations of human sociality from a variety of academic disciplines. You can learn more about TESIS at the website, www.tesis-itn.eu/

When we can envision a building or an artwork in our imaginations, it is usually the reverse trajectory that we imagine it to be. In other words, we rarely have vivid imagery in our minds first that we subsequently project into the world; rather, we usually have the real world representations that we study with such ardor that we can later reproduce them subjectively, to some extent, in our minds. In fact, it is this reverse trajectory that dominates most of human cognition. Because of our dualist prejudices, we credit our individual minds with more than their fair share. Language, values, every art and science, come from out there into our heads rather than vice-versa. Everything that is now in the head was first outside of it. If this all sounds too strident, it probably is, and it is probably still hinged on a dualistic ontology in too many ways to name. The relationships between individual minds and our shared worlds are more likely to be explained through a
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